Music reaches millions through it’s song. When the singer is a miracle in itself, it makes the message more powerful than we can imagine. I sang this song to my children when we walked the floors during many sleepless nights; through tough moments; and in times of deep moments of humility where I realized I knew so little yet have been empowered to do so much. This song reconnects me to the understanding that I can never do it alone.

My songs didn’t sound anything like this, but I have a feeling, with heart these words can make us all stars.

Today, it’s much easier to connect to internationally. I’ve formed relationships with international travelers to parents with special needs kids from all over the world. It wasn’t that long ago, being tucked away in Costa Rica, it would be easy to become isolated. A great source of information I’ve found is a Kristen Morrison from Australia.

Kristen Morrison is the author of Naturally Better: Dramatically Improve Your Child’s Life, Naturally. She has four children and lives in Melbourne. She’s documented the “luck” she’s had with creating a healthy, joyous life for her son with Down Syndrome.

“We have worked our guts out to help our son since he was born! But apparently we got very lucky that he has no heart defect, no thyroid problems, no mobility or vision issues.   We got lucky with his hearing, lucky with his ability to walk, lucky that he has only had to go to emergency once in his life (when he had a nasty cold) and has had no other serious illness.  We got lucky that he has no food intolerances or behaviour problems, lucky that he now speaks, lucky that he cuts with scissors at 3 and could read words at 18 months.

That’s pretty lucky.

And that’s exactly why I wrote my book.  It’s a case study. It’s only one child’s story, I understand this doesn’t constitute a double blind scientific study. But I felt the need to tell others what we did, what supplements and therapies I selected for him and what results we achieved in his first few years.  We observed miracles I had thought impossible. And now I read more and more stories from other parents who are doing some of what we have done and are observing similar improvements.

I guess they got lucky too.

I produced a documentary about our experiences to bring awareness for other parents that Down syndrome is NOT a life sentence. Children with Down syndrome DO respond to natural and alternative therapies very well.

I want others to know what is possible for their kids.  Or for the kids of people they know.  This is a human problem.  Humans should know there is something that can be done to make things better.” Click here to watch the documentary.

After seeing the documentary, you may want to download a free copy of her ebook, which can be found on her website: http://naturallybetterkids.com/ The first chapter is free to download.

I couldn’t feel “luckier” to have bonded with someone so special, so far away, yet so near.

A friend gave me a video called Crazy Sexy Cancer, a documentary about Kris Carr’s decision to battle cancer through a holistic approach. The movie was given to me by a friend who’s son also has Down Syndrome. We tend to bond over intestines, muscle tissue, snot, and how to sneak kale into a child’s diet. She gave me the film after both of us read The PH Miracle.

Watching movies is a pleasure sunken deep at the bottom of my “to-do” list. But with the help of my laptop, I watched the film while cooking and doing dishes over a several day period.

In this new world of reality television where people are pleased and thrilled to hoot, holler, and expose the most trivial parts of their life in front of a camera for the ego-boosting thrill of the camera, Kris’s documentary was a film set apart. As I watched her journey through diagnosis to several years later, I was struck at how she had the energy to deal with such a devastating diagnosis. Yet as I finished the film, I realized I was more struck by willingness of Kris to show the challenging, down-and-dirty, in-the-mud feelings of what it’s like to try to reverse a lifetime of probably not-so-good food choices mixed in with not really understanding why cancer should be dished out to anyone.

I’ve could relate to so much of the film as I too wondered why I got all these “things” in my life: Divorce, Down Syndrome, financial challenges; surgeries (for me and my son); teeth problems; and on and on. Before PH Miracle and Crazy Sexy Cancer, I ate a lot of vegetables. But I also drank a lot of coffee and “frappie” coffee drinks and chocolate and anything made of salty, warm, toasted carbohydrates. In the middle of my juicing, I ate a lot of things that didn’t let all that great organic juice do it’s thing.

I still fail. Regularly. In fact my kids just came back from a party with that dreaded pinata, and there I stood again in front of the refrigerator wondering if a bag of Tootsie Rolls was worth it. Yet, I do tend to win more than I lose of late. Juicing, avocado smoothies, exercise, and probably the most important of all - approaching the day with excitement - are recipes for inching forward a little bit every day in a quest to become healthy, wealthy, and perhaps wise.

After all the diets, theories, regimenes, and ideas of how to live the best life, I’ve had to come up with one of the most important theories of all: I am not sure anyone really knows all the answers, yet all make a good point about something. I sense that we all need to formulate a plan that works best for us. There are some pretty obvious “don’t” out there like don’t drink too much; drugs are out; two loaves of bread probably not good; and bacon fat a definite “gonner.” Too much of any diet or “magic bullet” can turn us into drill sergeant freaks where we forget perhaps the most important ingredient in any diet: Love, empathy, sharing, and a good old-fashioned zest for life.

Kris’s film captured a lot of this idea. In the end, she offered a lot of tips and ideas to help our own journey towards better health. Plus, her blog does the same. Check it out if you can carve a minute between meals.

Have you dreamed of moving to paradise? Finding a new life that will excite you from the inside out? What are we looking for in LIFE?

The Paradox of Paradise: A Woman’s Journey to a Place called Heaven on Earth dips into the dream of finding that piece of paradise we are all looking for. It all began with a trip to Costa Rica. Over a decade later the author is hear to tell about it.

The journey of writing this book began as memoir, stories of what it’s “really” like to move from a developed country to an developing country; to change from one culture to another; and to stay in the mix of it all long enough to tell find out paradise didn’t look anything as imagined in the first place.

The lovely land of Costa Rica that I’ve adopted as a place to call home was truly an adventure in the beginning. The funny thing about adventures are they have a beginning and an end. Fighting white water rapids and swinging from trees have their place, but we all have to go home at night and face the LIFE we’ve created. Well, along came my children. I was a person that worried desperately over the health of my pets. Children? At times I felt I’d been thrown to bottom of a bubbling volcano.

As many of my regular readers on Motherjungle know, my son was born in 2005 with Down Syndrome. That’s when the presses stopped. That’s when the ante upped and LIFE jiggled into a whole new puzzle to solve. The Paradox of Paradise tells the story of those first moments I found out my son was “different.” It’s not an easy place to be, but it was perfect for me. I seem to have roots now in this paradise abroad. As I’ve dug and planted my soul into new lessons, I’ve been able to assimilate who I was in the past into, I hope, a better version of myself.

Enjoy the book. It’s FREE. As a treat, it’s also full of video and audio performances that may be a first for all of you to see. I was excited to see this new form of visual-media-arts put out by Dreamsculpt Publishing. I couldn’t wait to join the project and am so excited it’s time to share it.

Finally, I hope you take the initiative to share this book with your friends, your clients, your mother, and anyone who’d like to see what it’s like to take that leap and dig into a journey of personal transformation in a place called Costa Rica, paradise.

You can click on the book to immediately start reading. To pass it on, you can send on MotherJungle or copy the URL of The Paradox of Paradise: A Woman’s Journey to a Place called Heaven on Earth into a link. You can also send the book’s own website as a link too: theparadoxofparadise.com

I’m looking for your transforming stories too. In the past few days, I’ve shared a few women who are on transformative journeys. Go here, if you’d like to share yours. I’ll be publishing them here and on The Paradox of Paradise book website.

Thank you for all your support and time.

Often, personal transformations go hand in hand with “outside’ challenges. As we’ll see tomorrow in my new book, The Paradox of Paradise: A Woman’s Journey to a Place called Paradise, my transformation started with making a life-changing move to Central America. The journey got even more challenging when my son was born with Down Syndrome in 2005.

I admire Sunniva Sorby, a leader not only in adventure travel but also in motivating kids and people throughout the world to face their challenges and transform. Sunniva began made history as one of the four-team members of the American Women’s Antarctic Expedition. The group reached their goal after a long and gruelling 700 mile trip across the snow and ice.

She lectures around the world and now has a new book with exciting video to compliment the text called, Will of the Wild.

I particularly love this quote from the book:

“Only when we discover who we truly are can we see and understand on a physical level and intellectual level that we are here for greater things. I am borne of the baby boomer generation, and we have been tagged as the ones who are unnecessarily creating huge environmental problems for the generations behind us. As we struggle to counter the effects of greenhouse gases, it is evident that our behaviors have been the direct result of our need to consume, to keep taking, to feel comfort all the time, and to have access to all things convenient.”

Sunniva Sorby continues her work through lectures and leading adventure travel. You can see her website at Circumpolar Concepts.

I’m honored to be a part of this group. There are more stories and FREE books to come. Tomorrow, we’ll get to hear tales from the heart of the MotherJungle.

When the rainy season takes over our afternoons in Costa Rica, it gets challenging to keep kids entertained. Unlike snow where you might be able to go out and whip a snowball around or hit a hockey puck for awhile, rain makes everything really wet and pretty impossibly to play in.

I’ve discovered a new, safe, fun, and dry place to play in Escazú, Costa Rica. Addison needs a lot of stimulation to stay walking and get exercise. The great benefit of the Playground - on the lower level of the new mall edition in Multiplaza in Escazú. - is that if you want to go, there’s no scheduled gym class or time slot. You just go. This system works our great for me, for I never know when Addison’s up to the task or not. Some afternoons, he’s just too tired.

I’ve had Addison in scheduled classes before and I just saw money flying away each time we’d have to miss a class. In all classes given in Costa Rica (young and old) a matricula is charged. The matricula usually adds up to another month’s fee and has to  paid before starting the classes. When we’d miss a class, we’d lose not only that class but a bit of that matricula I coughed up at the beginning.

Playground, a division of Yu Kids Island, offers big bouncy things, climbing things, slides, and spinning things. The entire floor is covered in a big matt. They even offer birthday packages. There is a height limit. My daughter Coco hunched over one last time to make it in and was told she’d just grown too tall.

But on those afternoons when Addison needs stimulation, we head to the Playground. They open at 10:30 a.m. on the week days. and 11:00 a.m. on weekends. They’ve told me it’s open until 8:30 p.m., but I’d always check before going. (A never-ending good-rule-of-thumb in Costa Rica before going anywhere!) The phone number is 506-2204-5804. Moms and dads can have a cup of coffee and hook up to the Internet. Playground offers a service where the adult can go in with the child or a guardaria - a day-care kind of service where the child is supervised while the adults can get some shopping in.

When I took my camera out for one last shot of Addison, he’d have nothing to do with just sitting there. He stormed my way, determined to get a look. I showed him the shot and tucked my camera away so we could head back up the giant slide.

A new world of publishing is emerging. No longer tied to the constraints of large publishers, authors have the world of Internet to thank for being able open their work up to an extended and excited audience. Flip Planet is transforming the idea of a book into a work of art.

Jared Rosen and David Rippe had a vision and made a bold move to think outside the book:

“The old world dream based in separation and scarcity no longer serves us. A new world based in truth and wholeness will prevail.”

Vision is one thing; application a necessity to move to a new level. How does Flip Planet do that? This visual-media book encompasses all the forms of technology we’ve been falling in love with over the growth of the Internet: Text, audio, and visual. The three come together to make reading come to life. Not to mention it looks great too.

The first book, Flip Planet: BluePrints for a New World, is a compilation book of leaders and visionaries making strides to change the face of our planet. Included in this book, you’ll find Vandana Shiva, a physicist, eco-feminist, philosopher, activist, and author of many books; Ray Anderson, a sought-after international speaker who gives nearly 100 talks each year to audiences hungry for a message about the company that is proving the business model for sustainability works; Daryl Hannah, actress and environmentalist on sustainable solutions; Dr. Robert Muller peace advocate and founder of the University for Peace in Costa Rica; Ekarat Tolle, author of “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” and “The Power of Now“; and Gary Zukov, author of “Seat of the Soul,” to name just a few of the contributors to the vision of this project. The M2e Flip Planet book is free.

This year, I’ll be part of another visual book by DreamSculpt. Together with ten other women from around the world, we’re producing a project on how we all have a part in not only transforming our world, but ourselves. In the next months, I’ll keep you up-to-date on the progress of the M2e book.

In the meantime, I hope you can check out Flip Planet and be a part of the generation and the new earth to come.

Waking up in the morning and feeling fresh often wears off after the morning shower. Even with the sunny Costa Rica mornings, life still keeps rolling. Children need raising, food needs fixing, and laundry washing.

So, I’m going to send off a video. Because I love to laugh and get as grumpy as the next gal. I do love bits American humor - especially when it’s edited into the funniest parts and I don’t have to watch the entire show.

I just had to laugh. I mean, this video really needs no other explanation. Because if we don’t laugh at ourselves, we”ll just end up old and grumpy. Paradise or no paradise.

Twice a day, Addison needs a therapy to jiggle his lungs. If someone were to walk in on us, it would look like I was beating up on the child. In a matter of forty minutes, he laughs his head off and then eventually cries and screams. But, we always start first with the laughs.

I always wondered what I do if I got one of those “things.” The big C. Or the heart attack; or the tumor; or the……..Well here we are. We got that THING. One of those dreaded words. Researching the underlying problem Addison has called pulmonary heart disease could throw me under a bus. My goodness reading the prognosis of this THING was more terrifying than jumping off a cliff into a gorge with a pack of wolves waiting for me. No one does well with this condition. It’s not curable; It’s a life long burden. Says who?

Then, I remembered I’d been through this before. After Addison’s surgery after birth, we discovered he had two cysts on his liver ducts. (And how did we live before Internet searches??!!) First I had to figure out what the heck the bile ducts were. These tiny cysts existed on two little tubes that drain the toxins the liver expels directly into the colon. I didn’t even know we had these parts were let alone that they could develop cysts. The doctors said: another surgery in four months. If we didn’t take them out, CANCER was guaranteed. There’s one of THOSE words again.

You’ll have to read about the whole account here, but in a nutshell, the cysts went away all by themselves. Perhaps I helped with diet. I have no idea what happened except that the doctor’s said they’d never in their life seen a case like this before. All cysts, they said, had to be removed surgically. Or they would become cancerous.

I do remember back then, in the time of cysts, we laughed a lot. Norman Cousins wrote a book called Anatomy of an Illness. This was a writer, peace advocate, and professor wrought with health issues. According to his write-up:

Cousins received the Albert Schweitzer Prize in 1990. He died of heart failure on November 30, 1990, having survived years longer than his doctors predicted: 10 years after his first heart attack, 16 years after his collagen (arthritic) illness, and 36 years after his doctors first diagnosed his heart disease.

I remember hearing about this book years and years ago. One of the main principles was that Cousin’s believed human emotions were the key to affecting health. He applied laughter as one of his main medicines. I applied nothing of this wisdom when I struggled through my surgeries and illnesses years ago. For some reason, though I hadn’t seen the book in years, the idea re-popped back into my head when “THAT D” word was mentioned in the hospital about Addison.

So before I begin the “beating on the chest therapy” I always start with a good laugh. Blowing on Addison’s round belly gets him going; then we move on to the ticklish crook of his neck; and round out the laughter with nuzzling my nose into his ribs. When he gets to that super silly part, I ask him to sit up and then ask: More? He nods and says more. And so it goes on.

We try to carry this philosophy of at least smiling, throughout the day. My brother is a pro at making goofy faces. A talent I learned from him. And I know I fail more than I succeed. I’m the first to snip at my daughter or swear when Addison’s diaper contents have just smeared all over my favorite pants and belt and shirt. Yet, I even managed to dance in the hospital to High-Five, about the only highlight of mine and Addison’s day. And it is contagious, for one day the nurse walked in and though conservative and timid in her laughter, she started singing and even did a little hand jive.

I am no longer falling off a cliff. Instead I live as though I am always free-falling through the air. I took the leap and now must walk the talk to stay afloat and not let the wolves get me in the end.

The photo above was taken a few months before we found out the cysts had disappeared.

Addison was about five months old.

Travelojos - new site dedicated to Latin American travel and expat living - has listed MotherJungle as one of the Costa Rican sites to follow. I like Steven’s site as it’s clean and crisp, and he seems to be posting quite regularly. (I think he also may know a lot more about me than traveling Latin America, but I’m not willing to admit that too readily.) From his “About Me” photo I can see he clearly enjoys the coconut - a subject near and dear to my heart.

What I really like is that Travelojos is out to bring us “newbies” at the Latin thing - whether the big move or just a trip - together to share ideas, comments, and information. My good friend over at Open Toe Shoes was also placed as a blog to watch. I’ve mentioned before the lovely artwork you can see at Open Toe. Plus Alison gives a nice perspective on life a bit more out in the campo than I could ever do since I live within a stones throw from so much shopping it’s amazing I just don’t spontaneously drop right in my own home.

I wish Travelojos a bunch of luck. We’ll keep following and hope they do the same.

Pura Vida.